Over the last three decades, EU regulation of the internal market has become highly pervasive,
affecting practically all the domains of European citizens’ lives. Many studies have focused on
understanding the process and causes of regulatory reform. However, these have typically been
small-scale or small-n studies, with no or limited attempts to analyse the more general sources of
regulatory reform. In this paper, we focus on the determinants of stability and change in EU
regulation. We develop an original dataset of 169 pieces of legislation (regulations, directives and
decisions) across eight different sectors, and analyse the dynamics of regulatory reform in the EU.
Using time series analysis of count data, we find evidence that the number of winning coalitions in
the Council and the size of EU membership have a significant impact on regulatory reform in the
EU. However, the political (left-right) composition of EU’s legislative bodies has no significant
impact on the process of regulatory reform.

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These writings constitute my PhD dissertation in financial economics. The dissertation consists of three
chapters. Each chapter can be read independently of the others, but all three chapters share the dissertation’s
overall topic: Measuring and pricing the risk of corporate failures.
The ability to adequately measure and price the risk of corporate failures is vital for creditors, shareholders,
and regulators of financial institutions. Whenever a firm uses debt instruments such as loans or bonds to
finance its operations, the firm may fail to meet the debt’s contractual obligations. Typically, a failure is in
the form of a default on a payment of interest or principle, but can also be a violation of a covenant attached
to the debt or a bankruptcy filing by the firm or by the creditors on behalf of the firm. If a firm fails, it may
be forced to temporarily or permanently halt its operations, which can entail losses: Creditors may realize a
loss on their promised payments, while shareholders may see their entire equity stake wiped out. Therefore,
creditors and shareholders need to adequately measure the risk of a failure, so that this risk can be reflected
in the prices they are willing to pay—and the returns they require—for holding a firm’s financial securities.
At the same time, regulators must be able to verify that a financial institution is adequately cushioned against
this risk, so that losses do not destabilize an important institution or even the financial system itself.

Consumers reactions from being exposed to sponsorships has primarily been measured and docu-mented applying cognitive information processing models to the phenomenon. In the paper it is argued that such effects are probably better modelled applying models of peripheral information processing to the measurements, and it is suggested that the effects can be measured on the atti-tudes-towards-the sponsor and on the emotion-towards-the sponsor levels. This type of modelling is known as the ELAM model, however the types of independent variables involved is new to research into sponsorship effects. Two batteries of statements, attitude words and feeling words, are developed and a study is carried out with 470 respondents, randomly selected from the population. The data are analysed and pro-vide expressions of positive and negative attitude reaction and emotional reaction that show marked differences in consumer reactions towards sponsored objects of different natures as well as towards potential sponsoring organisations. For instance, the charitable institutions measured in the study elicit larger negative emotional re-sponses than positive responses, corresponding to a negative Net Emotional Response Score (NERS). Amongst the potential sponsoring companies only one company – a tobacco manufacturer – show this profile in NERS. The variation in NERS between charitable institutions and sports insti-tutions is quite dramatic – and has a high face validity. When studying attitude responses (Net Atti-tude Response Score or NARS), the differences between sponsored institutions are much smaller, although the charitable institutions still show a structurally different profile from the cultural and sports institutions. The differences between companies in NARS are quite small and probably only significant in a few instances. The NERS and NARS data are used to illustrate a "goodness-of-fit�? measurement that companies – or organisations looking for sponsors – can use to determine whether a potential arrangement has the ability to provide the desired effects on reactions. This goodness of fit is both applied to the net scores and to the full evaluations on the attitude and emotion batteries and it seems as if the latter approach will be richer in explanatory power for a potential sponsor.

In recent years, new digital media have become important for social networking and content sharing. Due to their large diffusion, social media platforms have also both increased the strategic importance of managing corporate reputation and rendered this more difficult. Companies are increasingly apprehensive about information and opinions that can spread through online communities rapidly without any control. While social media platforms increase the power of stakeholders, they also represent a large-scale source of information about feelings, opinions and sentiments of people that allow us to measure and monitor reputation through the analysis of user generated content in real-time. In this paper, we show how social media content can be used to measure the online reputation of a company. Furthermore, we present an open platform that uses a sentiment analysis algorithm on twitter traffic to monitor the real time evolution of company reputation.

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Purpose - 3PL services are more or less individually designed bundles of logistics
operations that are provided on the basis of a long term relationship between logistics
service providers and their clients mostly in industry and retail. The appropriate degree of
the individuality is however subject to a trade-off between the creation of complexity to
reflect individual customer needs and the realization of synergy effects by the replication
of common elements and the multiplied utilization of relevant resources for different
customers. The appropriate mix of the more individual elements and the more common
elements is seen as a major success factor for the design of the service propositions.
Design/methodology/approach - The explorative paper is combining major elements and
frameworks from different interdisciplinary research streams, such as modularity and
service design and adapts them to the subject of third party logistics.
Findings - As a major result the paper is providing a conceptual model for the systematic
and formal description of modularity and individuality in the configuration of third party
logistics services. The model thus serves as a tool to classify and categorize degrees of
complexity that are embedded in TPL settings.
Research limitations/implications (if applicable) - As our research is still in the
exploratory stage, we do not offer empirical findings.
Practical implications - Our findings can help firms to better understand the critical
factors in their current TPL service offerings and how to replicate or (re)design the new
services offered. Depending on the level of complexity of the TPL services, firms need
also to consider the implications of the replication and/or (re)design on the configuration of
the supply chain, especially downstream.
Originality/value - The paper crosses disciplinary boundaries and combines relevant
research streams to provide a sound foundation for the categorization and classification of
TPL services and for new service design/development (NSD) and supply chain
configuration.

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This paper introduces an index of tax optimality that
measures the distance of some current tax structure from the optimal tax
structure in the presence of public goods. In doing so, we derive a [0, 1]
number that reveals immediately how far the current tax configuration
is from the optimal one and, thereby, the degree of efficiency of a tax
system. We call this number the Tax Optimality Index. We show how
the basic method can be altered in order to derive a revenue equivalent
uniform tax, which measures the size of the public sector. A numerical
example is used to illustrate the method developed.
JEL Code: H21, H41.
Keywords: Tax optimality index, excess burden, distance function.
Authors Affiliations: Raimondos-Møller: Copenhagen Business School, CEPR,
CESifo, and EPRU. Woodland: University of Sydney.

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’Growth’ as a concept is often not very well understood. Growth may be measured in a variety of ways (e.g., growth in turnover, earnings, earnings per share, assets, and shareholders equity).
Investors and other capital providers generally find it attractive to invest in ‘growth firms.’ For instance, earnings per share (EPS) figures are widely published and used by investors. An increase in EPS is seen as a signal of improved profitability. Likewise, growth in earnings measures such as EBIT, EBITA, EBITDA etc. seem to indicate that firms are value creating.
Our paper discusses if and under what conditions growth in accounting variables (accounting numbers and financial ratios) is value creating. We find that growth in one-periodic earnings measures does not necessarily create wealth for shareholders. Only growth in economic income is value creating. Our analysis also provide evidence that users of accounting information should be aware of the quality of growth and distinguish between growth based on transitory vs. permanent components of earnings. Our analysis finally documents that growth in earnings per share or return on equity caused by share repurchases has no economic significance.

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Tourism has a dualistic nature characterised on the one hand by a high resilience and constant growth and on the other hand by a short-term greed of “consuming” its own life support systems: nature, culture and communities (Snepenger, Snepenger, Dalbey, & Wessol, 2007). Both aspects are constantly spurred by the rapid changes in demand and the diversity of supply, and the intrinsic importance that tourism has gained in individual lifestyles and in national economies. In addition, the strong influence of globalization on the institutional, organizational and policy formulation (Hall, 2005), determines three major aspects of tourism: the expansion of demand, the concentration of supply and increased similarities in demand. (Cornelissen, 2005) Consequently, the fragile balance required by a sustainable tourism development (European Commission, 2003a), (UNEP / UNWTO / WMO, 2008) is often at risk from conflicting goals of conservation versus development plans for tourism. Mixed approaches that combine top-down governance models with bottom-up collaborative strategies and policy networks are considered able to provide resilient decision making systems able to cope with unexpected challenges or conflict situations. These are characterized by shared rule-making and agreements between interdependent actors with divergent opinions and goals (Elzen, Geels, & Ken, 2004). Ultimately, a significant progress towards sustainability can be achieved by fostering changes of meaning and concepts, infrastructures and user-learning processes (Ehrenfeld, 2001).

Quasi-public institutions are significant but unsung players in the contemporary international financial order. What can be understood as quasi-public institutions (QPIs) have been created by states or private associations to provide a means of mediating private capital with public value, typically attracting domestic and international investment in order to foster and further a domestic agenda that has strong support from the broader population. As such they fit awkwardly with common perceptions of the international political economy as dominated institutions that reflect either state or market interests. QPIs do both and have emerged as institutional responses to domestic crises that then go on to have a role in shaping the world economy. QPIs that issue collaterized securities from mortgage credit, be they public or private in origin, reflect this institutional form given that their purpose is to bring together private capital and public value. This purpose also makes QPIs sensitive to everyday politics, given that they were created to reflect a broad social purpose rather than only elite interests. This article discusses the development of QPIs for mortgage bonds in a liberal market economy, the U.S., and a coordinated market economy, Denmark. I suggest that QPIs’ values have been challenged by de-regulatory and re-regulatory trends in recent decades. I suggest that QPIs call upon us to question how we identify actors in the international financial order as either public or private, and the importance of everyday politics in fostering institutional innovations that have significant knock-on effects for the world economy.

This thesis offers a critical contribution to the theories of work-life balance. Within the
contemporary theoretical perspectives on work and life the individuals are constructed
as being responsible for work-life balance by turning it into a problem of the personal
behaviour, decisions, psychological traits and family condition of the human subject.
In this sense the everyday problem of balancing between work and home is reduced to
be primarily an individual problem and decision. When the problem of work-life
balance is raised in this way, it is difficult for companies to offer managerial and
organizational solutions that do not automatically exclude this as an individual problem.
It might be possible for managers and organizations to help the employees in achieving
work-life balance, but it is fundamentally a challenge that the individual employees
must solve.
The thesis offers a different perspective on the relation between work and life. This
perspective is not based upon the individual employees’ perception and hence
constitution of work-life balance. Instead, it is argued that the constitution of the
relation of work and life is to be found in its effects. These effects are not established in
the constitution of the boundary between work and home, but are rather recognized by
how the employees determine and define activities and tasks as work. For example, is it
work to send email in the evening? Is it work to read an article at the weekend? Is it
work to update a profile on Facebook? The question is therefore ‘what is work?’ and not
‘what is the boundary between work and home?’

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The in vivo research methodology holds promise to improve some of the limitations of typical design cognition methodologies. Whereas typical design cognition methodology use protocol a nalysis (utilizing special ‘think-aloud’ instructions and/or artificial settings) or retrospective analyses, in vivo research attempts to study design thinking and reasoning ‘live’ or ‘online’ as it takes place in the real world. No special instructions are used since the method relies on natural dialogue taking place between designers. By recording verbalizations at product development meetings (or other suitable objects of study), transcribing, and coding the data, it is possible to test hypotheses about design cognition in the real-world. This promises to improve the ecological validity over typical design cognition studies. Problems with the methodology include labor-intensiveness leading to small samples (possible sampling errors). To deal with this problem, it is recommended to supplement in vivo research with traditional larger sample laboratory studies.